HP takes on iPad mini, Kindle

Apple wanted you to think bigger. HP wants you to “think smaller". It’s just announced the Slate 7, an Android tablet with a small, 7-inch screen and an even smaller price tag of just $US169.

The tablet, announced on the weekend at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, features the usual menu of software and features - Android 4.1.2, a 1.6GHz dual-core processor, WiFi but not 4G - plus some exotic dishes, too, such as a Beats Audio sound system and simplified printing over a network. It just wouldn’t be an HP device if there wasn’t something about printing and Beats Audio.

HP is itself accustomed to thinking small when it comes to tablets. You may recall the last time it came out with a consumer-oriented tablet, the TouchPad, it yanked the thing off the market a few short days after it went on sale in Australia. It may have been a few weeks. I don’t recall exactly how long it was on the market for. It was the blink of an eye, however long it was. A small amount of time.

This one looks a little more promising. For starters, it’s as cheap as chips, and Amazon and Google have both proven there’s a market for chip-as-chips, 7-inch Android tablets with their respective Kindle Fire ($US159) and Nexus 7 ($US199) tablets.

Also, it’s Android, which means that HP execs won’t be burdened with the task of trying to establish an ecosystem for the Slate 7, which so overwhelmed them with the TouchPad. That tablet, you may recall, ran the webOS operating system which HP acquired from poor old Palm. HP so couldn’t be bothered building up webOS, it kicked it to open source and told the world, have at it.

The Slate 7 is due to be released in the US in April, with the rest of the world to follow shortly thereafter. There’s not yet any word on Australian pricing, but there doesn’t appear to be anything about the Slate 7 that would stop you buying it in the US for a trifling $US169 anyway, thereby avoiding the usual Tyranny Of Distance Tax nonsense. $US169 is significantly cheaper than what you would have to pay for Apple’s iPad mini, which starts at $369. But of course the iPad mini has a 7.9-inch display, rather than the 7-inch display that Steve Jobs so belittled.

HP is also working on Android-powered smartphones, but its new CEO, Meg Whitman, has said that the company won’t release a phone in 2013.